Srikrishna Ramesh alias Sriki, 26, has claimed in statements given to the Bengaluru police that he had hacked into the British Virgin Islands-based Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange in 2015-16.
Why was the ED, CBI, or Interpol not informed till it was reported by the media? Was it bcoz the then @HMOKarnataka @BSBommai was scared of being exposed?” he added.
Based on a request for information made under Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts by The Indian Express, the FBI stated in December 2021 that it had been “unable to identify records” with respect to the Bitfinex hack.
However, in February this year, US agencies—a criminal investigation unit of the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI, and a Homeland Security investigation unit—reported the detection of nearly $3.6 billion’s worth of the bitcoins from the 2016 hack, following the arrests of Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife, Heather Morgan, in New York.
The US investigations have found that a set of email IDs used to create accounts at a virtual cryptocurrency exchange where a portion of the stolen bitcoins was parked in 2017 were generated using India-based email service providers.
The second instance was a simple spear-phishing attack which led to two Israeli hackers working for the army getting access to the computers of one of the employees which gave them access to the AWS cloud account,” Srikrishna told the police.
According to his statement, Srikrishna made an “approx profit: 2000 BTC” from the Bitfinex hack and blew the entire amount on a “luxurious lifestyle”.
The hacker also said he had managed to sell the stolen Bitfinex bitcoins by using concealment techniques.
“I understood the case scenario that even if I do not give them the Bitcoins they can use forensic methods to find the Bitcoins, after a talk with the investigating officer.
Blockchain analysts reported on social media on April 14, 2021, that nearly 12,000 out of the nearly 1,20,000 stolen Bitfinex bitcoins had moved for the first time in over four years.
In January this year, an older brother of the hacker was stopped at Bengaluru airport from leaving for the Netherlands, based on a lookout circular issued by the ED, which has been investigating the money-laundering aspects.